Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with dialog

Dialogue drowned out on DVDs

bonobothegreat — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 18:42:37 -0800

Whenever I watch DVDs on my TV, the dialogue is always drowned out by sound effects and music. I'm not interested in buying a surround sound system and was wondering if simply buying a newer model DVD player (than my Panasonic S25) will fix the problem. I've tried changing all the audio menu settings with no noticeable improvement and googling brings up a bunch of recommendations about turning up the "center channel" and other audiophile surround sound related stuff.

Any DVD player recommendations will be gratefully received.

When do a bunch of characters solve a problem in one long conversation?

nebulawindphone — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 18:18:20 -0800

I'm looking for dialog-heavy scenes (in books, movies, TV shows, etc) where a group of people solve a problem or make a plan in the course of one long conversation. The "one long conversation" criterion is what makes this hard. Most police procedurals, for instance, don't work because the problem-solving is spread out across many short conversations in the course of an episode. The planning in heist movies tends to be the same way — split up, or scattered through some sort of "preparation" montage. I want examples where you get to watch the whole problem-solving process from beginning to end, with one set of participants, no jumps forward or backward in time, and no interruptions.

Bonus points, too, if the problem involves subgoals (e.g. "To get the money we'll need to break into the building, get past the guards, and open the safe. Now let's think about how to break into the building....")

Lest this sound too chatfiltery, there is a practical problem here: I'm doing research on the linguistic structure of conversations, and I'd like some well-known examples of this kind of conversation that I can point to as examples.

Create dialog box within page

mcarthey — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 08:06:04 -0800

How do I create a pop-up dialog box within a webpage that opens within the same page? I would provide more information, but I haven't been able to determine what this is called, therefore it's hard to search for.
I would like to create a link (or image) that, when moused-over, the item zooms into an expanded window. I found this but I'd like it to essentially create a dialog box within the site. I don't know if it helps to say that buy.com *used* to have this, and I've seen it on many sites that open a survey window or the like.
I'd simply appreciate a pointer as to what this is called.
Thanks!

When did movie soundtracks (on LP and CD) begin mixing in snippets of dialog from the film?

monkeybutt — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 21:51:24 -0800

When did movie soundtracks (on LP and CD) begin mixing in snippets of dialog from the film? Pulp Fiction is probably the best-known example of using tidbits of dialog from a film inside the release of the soundtrack (either between tracks or interspersed inside tracks), but I know a ton of others have done it as well. I have a Blade Runner OST that did the same thing and I think it came out in advance of the Pulp one.

Can the MeFi crowd provide earlier examples and help us narrow in on when this catchy vehicle was first used?

thanks

Can I make the side panel of Windows dialogs more like OSX?

AmbroseChapel — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 23:13:58 -0800

Can I make the side panel of Windows dialogs more like OSX? I don't know exactly what the name is for the thing I'm talking about, but here's an example (the bit outlined in red).

On the left hand side of most of my dialog boxes there's a panel or frame which has shortcut links to various things -- various things I don't need. I don't even really know how they got there, presumably the corporate IT people set them up, as they relate to work?

Is there some kind of hack or utility to customise that area, so that it's actually useful to me?

The basic problem is, I use windows at work and I spend a lot of time navigating to and from the same folders in a complex structure, and at home on the Mac I just drag those folders to the left-hand pane for quick access.

So of course, any other answer which lets me tweak dialogs to make navigating easier would be good. I can't move the folders (they mirror a server structure).

Help My Mac Tell Me When to Blow My Nose ...

WCityMike — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 15:08:03 -0800

I'm looking for a Mac OS X application that lets me quickly, without a clunky UI or 500 steps, tell the Mac to pop up an alert at specific times of day, with the ability of recurrence. I've tried some apps and ruled them out: Alarm Clock Pro has a background daemon that has a nasty memory leak that the programmers just won't fix, and its UI isn't really good (it's a crossplatform app); iCal and Entourage are very bloated for this sole purpose, and I dislike iCal's UI for entering tasks; remind combined with growlnotify was unreliable, despite a lot of effort to debug; and Quicksilver's timed events isn't really what I'm looking for, either. Just give me something that lets me tell my Mac to pop up a window every Thursday at 7:30 pm, or every day at 10:30 pm, or just tonight at 5:00 pm, or so on that says text of my choosing. Preferably freeware and a universal binary (an application that runs natively on the Intel Macs), but I won't be more picky than I've been already! :)

You can assume my level of competency on the Mac is not too bad. I've goofed with Unix and command-line stuff, and I feel moderately comfortable with higher-level techie stuff, although by no means am I an expert.